


Albtraum

by theorangewitch



Series: Angstober [27]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Nightmares, but it's brief and mild, i'm kinda hesitant to tag this w/ violence but there isn't a lot of violence?, it's like burned stuff tho which i find creepy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-07
Updated: 2018-11-07
Packaged: 2019-08-20 02:34:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16547165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theorangewitch/pseuds/theorangewitch
Summary: One thing that the Mighty Nein have in common is that they all have nightmares. What their nightmares are about varies.





	Albtraum

**Author's Note:**

> The final piece for Angstober, and the final one in which I make up for the three days I missed. Day 28 - Nightmares! All of my election anxiety got poured into this, so enjoy. Anyway, the violence tag is just a precaution, all the violence occurs in dreams and it's not active violence, it's just messed up corpses. Skip Caleb's sequence, the first three paragraphs, if you're uncomfortable with it. 
> 
> And for the final time, the link to the full list of Angstober prompts is in the author's note of the first work in this series.

Caleb’s nightmares, of course, always feature fire. In the most mild ones, it is he who is burning. The fire eats up his coat, turning it to cinders, and then it scorches his skin so that it pinkens and ripples and then chars. In the end, he is reduced to a pile of ashes and bones as embers still burn at his core. In the worse dreams, it is his parents again, his house alight, their screams being borne up into the air on the clouds of smoke. Sometimes he hears Astrid’s and Eodwulf’s cries along with them, a horrifying chorus of screams carrying through the night air.

In the absolute worst of the dreams, his parents make it out of the house. Sometimes he runs forward and digs them out of the charred remains of his house. They’re always mostly alive, but their bodies are unrecognizable. They’re still on fire a little bit, their forms comprised partially of embers, and their skin is popped and scarred, their eyes burst in their sockets. His mother would crane her head up and look at him with her empty eye sockets and ask, “Why?” Other times, they make it out of the burning house on their own. They shamble towards him across the yard with their arms outstretched like zombies. They’re burning, still burning, always burning. “Why?” they groan. “ _Why?_ ” And he’ll never have an answer.

And then Caleb wakes up, sweating even though it’s freezing out on the ocean. He reaches out to Nott, who’s still asleep, curled up with her head on his arm. He pushes a strand of hair out of her face, like a mother would her sleeping child. She is not burning. He is not burning. The fire that consumed his parents went out a long time ago. Nott is snoring loudly. Somehow, though, it’s comforting.

 

Nott, on the other hand, always has nightmares about water. At first it’s only up to her ankles, and she’s standing in a bathtub, half empty. Safe. But then the walls of the tub rise up and it begins to fill with water, and there’s no escape, no air. She’s drowning in a bathtub. She calls out for Caleb, for Yeza, for anyone, but when she opens her mouth it only lets the water in and her words come out as only bubbles. Since arriving on the coast, she’s had dreams about drowning in the ocean, too. She feels a big, meaty hand grab her by the head and push her under and hold her there, her face partially buried in sand.

When she wakes up back on _The Squall-Eater_ after making it off the island, she’s still shivering. The water in the temple had made its way under her skin and into her bones. Caleb is asleep. Fitfully, as usual, but he’s a comfort. It’s the middle of the night and she realizes what she’s awoken to. Fjord and Avantika. Or she assumes it’s them. She supposes that they’re trying to be quiet, all things considered, but it’s a small ship with thin walls and goblins have big ears. She wants to get up and bang on the door to the captain’s quarters and tell them to _stop, this is a bad idea Fjord, c’mon_. But she doesn’t. She only turns over and tries to go back to sleep. Only her fear of the water that surrounds them keeps sleep at bay.

 

Fjord never dreamed of drowning until he almost drowned in real life. Drowning is the type of thing that sailors never think about because they don’t want to consider the probability that it might happen to them. The ship’s cook, an old, half-blind woman named Randall, had almost drowned once, she said. She felt like her chest was on fire, she said. It was the worst feeling in the world, she said, her limbs turning to jelly, her brain going foggy, her vision swimming.

When Fjord found himself drowning after Sabian’s betrayal, he realized that Randall had been wrong. Drowning wasn’t the worst feeling in the world. It was worse. Worse than Randall could’ve possibly described, worse than Fjord could’ve possibly imagined. He was thrashing against the water that held him tighter than any net, and his lungs were pounding against his rib cage like a moth beating itself to death against a lantern.

And now, in between the dreams that Uk’otoa sends him, he dreams of that night. Not knowing which way is up, the cold _certainty_ that he was going to die, and then finally breaking the surface and being surrounded by fire. He knows that the Serpent saved his life that night, breathed air into his lungs so that he could make it to the surface.

That night, in bed across from Caduceus, the weight of his decision to sleep with Avantika pressing down on his chest, he dreams of the shipwreck. When he wakes up, he doesn’t cough up seawater, but he feels like he wants to.

 

Jester rarely has nightmares at all. She kept a dream journal once, for two months, because she read that it would help her lucid dream, but she got bored of it. Most of her dreams are too strange to put into words anyway. They’re more collections of feelings and images than narratives. Like, she’ll be flying through the clouds on a rainbow unicorn with two horns at one moment and then suddenly the unicorn will be a rat with reptilian wings and she’ll be Beau only Beau as an old lady and then the rat will speak in her mother’s voice and say, “Yell timber, Jester!” and she will and then she’ll wake up.

Like that.

Only tonight, mere hours after Fjord pushed air into her lungs by kissing her, she watched him go into Avantika’s room and not come out.

So that night she dreams something far more coherent. She dreams she’s a little girl again, locked away in her room and listening to her mother with another client. Another day, another client. And she’s lonely and she can feel it like the cold breath of winter on her skin. She draws a picture of herself with her mother, holding hands, and colors in a big red heart between them. The room at The Lavish Chateau rocks like a boat at sea.

 _You are adrift_ , a genderless voice whispers to the room.

Jester colors harder, digging her crayon into the paper so that it punches right through. Through the hole in the paper, an eye stares back at her. It doesn’t look familiar. It’s crying, tears welling up along its bottom eyelid and rolling down into oblivion. Jester, little Jester, wants to go home.

 _But you are home_ , the voice says again. _Or aren’t you?_

Jester wakes up. It’s still night. _I’m not home,_ she thinks. Though she’s missed her mother terribly these long months, she never felt the pull to run away back. Not even when she was kidnapped. But now she is at sea. Still at sea, for The Traveler knows how long. Still at sea. Still adrift.

 

Beau also rarely has nightmares, at least, not ones that she remembers. One time her brother leaned in and asked her, “Beau, what are you most afraid of?”

She thought it was a challenge, something he’d use against her in their next playful wrestling match. She thought he expected an answer like ‘spiders’ or ‘snakes’ (neither of which she was particularly afraid of), so she said, “Nothing.”

“Really?” he said, some hurt in his voice. “Not anything?” Then he paused and said, “You know when you go to sleep and you don’t dream? You just go to sleep and wake up and it’s like no time has passed but it’s been hours? That’s what I’m afraid of. If death is like that.”

“But we know death isn’t like that,” Beau told him. “People have come back from the dead before.”

“I know,” he said. “But what if it’s not? What if it’s just nothing?”

 _Nothing. Oblivion. Nothing_. Beau wakes up in a cold sweat to another dream she doesn’t remember and for a moment she thinks she sees her brother’s face hovering over her like a demon sitting on her chest. But she blinks and then he’s gone. Jester and Yasha are still asleep and there’s no one else there.

 

As common nightmare themes go, Yasha’s is falling. She isn’t falling _from_ or _towards_ anywhere, she’s just falling. Someone once told her that the fear of falling isn’t really of falling, it was of hitting the ground. But that was never it for Yasha. She never hits the ground in her dreams, never even sees the ground. It’s only the feeling of plummeting, of free falling with no rope, no safety net, the air rushing out of her lungs as the nothingness around her gets darker and darker.

She fell, once. Fell so far and so fast and she only made it here because the Storm Lord caught her. But every time she trips over a root in the forest or stumbles down the stairs she is thrown back to that place, that time, when she fell and she thought that nothing and no one was ever, ever going to catch her. Since Molly’s death, the moments of suspension have become more frequent, and so have the nightmares. There are moments at the edge of sleep where she thinks she heard his voice, but of course, he’s not there. And then she falls again.

During this particular nightmare, she can hear and see waves crashing down above her, and they cast the light around her in a strange gray-green glow. Her skeletal wings unfurl and struggle uselessly against her descent. Yasha could never fly, even before her fall. But that didn’t stop her from trying.

She wakes up before her surroundings change, curled up on the pitching floor of _The Squall-Eater_. She got used to sleeping anywhere during her travels around the continent, but this is something she doesn’t think she’ll ever be used to: the ground not being solid under her feet. It was too much like falling. She usually doesn’t mind sleeping on the floor, but just this once she wishes she had crawled into bed with Jester or Beau, just to leech off of their stability. They seem to sleep so calmly. Do they dream?

 

Caduceus usually dreams of death and decay. Due to his own nature, sometimes these dreams are calm. He’s sitting among his graves, lichen crawling up the headstones, as the days become nights become days again and the world around him slowly crumbles into dirt and then rises again as trees. It’s a beautiful little cycle, and one he’s always enjoyed watching.

But sometimes the decay is darker. It takes the form of zombies shambling past him towards some unknown destination, hunger in their eyes. Caduceus wants to stop them, to destroy them, but he can’t move. On this night, in the middle of the tortured ocean, he has one of his zombie dreams. He hates them, he hates them, their unnatural-ness, how they violate his beautiful little cycle in every conceivable way. But he’s still frozen. And then the water rushes in, washing over the moss and filling the air with the stink of salt. Salted earth means that nothing will grow there anymore. The zombies break into a run, hurtling off into the distance. A mist is creeping inwards towards him, unraveling the ground in its path. The grass lifts up, and then the dirt. When it reaches the tombstones they dissolve too. And then it reaches Caduceus.

And he wakes up. Fjord is snoring soundly. Caduceus wonders how it’s possible to sleep without disturbance on this ship. Of course, as a sailor, this must be natural for him. Natural. Nothing about this place is natural except the water, and even that just barely. Caduceus is cold and tired and he wants to go home. What will his graveyard look like when he returns? Will it have recovered? Probably not. He hasn’t even come close to finding the source of its ailment.

He thinks of the zombies, all running off mindlessly in one direction. _Go east,_ The Wildmother told him. But he hasn’t yet, and maybe with these people, he never will. He turns over in his bed and tries to go back to sleep.

 

In between stints of being underground, Molly dreamed of, well, being underground. He would claw and struggle and writhe against the crushing hold of the dirt around him, trying to reach light and air, but to no avail. In the first months of being with the circus, he would always awaken so relieved to be in the open air that he would start crying.

And now he is underground again, in a dark tomb that knows no sound, only this time he does not wake and he does not dream. His eyes do not open, and they see only nothingness. _Nothing. Oblivion. Nothing._

**Author's Note:**

> Now for a hard-earned self-promo! If you enjoyed that piece, why not leave a kudo or a comment telling me your thoughts? And, if you like angst, why not go and check out the rest of the Angstober series? They're mostly original pieces, but I promise that they're just as good. Some of them may even be better.


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